Brian Thompson: The Butterfly Watcher

By Brian Thompson

Sunday

Mar 3, 2019 at 2:01 AM

I was standing in my front yard, staring up at the side of my house, oblivious to how warm it was. Oblivious to my surroundings. Oblivious to my former neighbor who was calling out to me: “It’s still there, you know,” he said.

“Huh?” I asked, slightly dazed. “What’s still there?”

“Whatever you’re looking at. It’s still there.”

Yep, it was confirmed, and official: I looked like a crazy man. And maybe I had gone crazy, because what he said made no sense. What I was looking at WASN’T still there. It had moved. I couldn’t find it anymore. Gone!

A caterpillar. For crying out loud, I was looking for a giant caterpillar.

Cra-zy!

OK, maybe not crazy. But I think I’ve become a bit of a butterfly-guy. I’ve tried to go my whole life without becoming any kind of “-guy.” Not the writer-guy or the runner-guy. Not the wow-he-sure-has-weird-hair-guy. I pull the ripcord just as I near the fanatic stage.

Then a bunch of dang butterflies laid a bunch of eggs on my milkweed and suddenly I’m the dang BUTTERFLY-GUY!!!

Because, I got to tell you, they’re pretty fascinating! I mean, like, alien species fascinating. Think about this: A creature flies up and lays some eggs. Those eggs hatch into strange prickly beasts with lots of legs and an appetite for devouring everything down to nubs. Oh, and their plant du jour (milkweed) is poisonous! Then fat on poisonous plant leaves, they glue their butts to a nearby stick or railing, go into a weird poisonous plant coma, transform into a chrysalis (think pea pod ate the caterpillar) and a few days later … PRESTO! … a beautiful butterfly emerges.

Shoot, all I need is the butterfly to attack my face while I’m leaning over to investigate and we have the makings of a great horror movie.

This has become my life now. I stand and stare, watching fat caterpillars gnaw on leaves. Or I poke around the bushes trying to find chrysalises. All while screaming: “AHH! Butterfly attacked my face … nope. False alarm. Just a cobweb.”

Neighbors don’t know what to make of me. “He’s staring at that blank walk again,” they say. “I told you we never should have bought this house!”

And it’s getting harder to find them. I’m like a kid on Easter morning trying to hunt down decorated eggs. I run around wearing next to nothing screaming, “I found one! See!!! Over here!”

One is dangling from the windowsill. Another one is on the fence. And then there’s one … wait a minute … that guy’s trying to steal my car!!!

What have I become? We went out and bought a bunch of extra milkweed. I put a chrysalis that had broken off a branch into a protected butterfly aviary. And I’m even considering getting a shirt that says: “Just Chew It.”

I guess there are worse things to be — the brews-his-own-paint-thinner-guy? The recreational-clown-guy?

And butterflies do their part for the environment, so that’s good. But maybe I need to scale back a little bit. The midnight searches in the yard with the flashlight are starting to freak out the neighbors, and I’m suddenly starting to see a lot of “For Sale” signs right around me.

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